Nicholson Baker vs. George W. Bush

As a Nicholson Baker fan (obv.), this makes me happy.

Hmmm, I'm excited! It looked like Baker was just settling in to his celebrator-of-the-quotidian role, and here's this!

Some of those dialogue excerpts, however, feel like they were penned by DeLillo!

remember how monica lewinsky gave vox to bill clinton? of all novelists, who would have thought that nicholson baker would have come to play a significant role in two presidential administrations?

i am a devout baker fan; mezzanine and u&i are among my favorite books - is double fold worth reading? i read baker for the sentence by sentence pleasures of his prose, and i'm not sure i'm interested enough in library politics to take the plunge...

could sopmeone cut and patste this? the link is not working for me. thanks.

double fold is deeply impt, both poltically and aesthically. one of the best polemics of the last little while, etc

I came to Baker through "Double Fold", then read his others. It's so rare to find a writer who is so ept at convincing fiction _and_ compelling non-fiction.

cutted and pasted:

A Novel's Plot Against the President
Character Fantasizes Bush Assassination

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page C01

In Nicholson Baker's new novella, "Checkpoint," a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.

It's a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president's life are actually made, but the novel is likely to be incendiary, as with Michael Moore's documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Flush with the headline-generating success of "My Life," by Bill Clinton, Alfred A. Knopf is planning to publish Baker's work Aug. 24, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. "Checkpoint" is 115 pages long and will sell for $18.

In the book, two men -- Ben and Jay -- meet at the fictional Adele Hotel and Suites in Washington. It is midday. They eat a bag of bagel chips and order lunch from room service. They talk into a tape recorder.

Ben: Obviously you have something on your mind.

Jay: That's true.

Ben: You could begin with that.

Jay: Okay. Uh. I'm going to -- okay. I'll just say it. Um.

Ben: What is it?

Jay: I'm going to assassinate the president.

Though it is against the law to threaten the president in real life, a work of fiction is usually protected by the First Amendment.

"Under a big 1968 Supreme Court precedent, Brandenburg v. Ohio, speaking of assassinating the president cannot be forbidden or punished unless the speaker's purpose is to provoke an assassination attempt and that is likely to be the effect," says legal scholar Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal. "It's quite possible in the wake of more recent developments -- 9/11 especially -- the court might modify that in some kinds of cases. But it's almost inconceivable that the court would allow punishment of a novelist for what one of his characters says about killing the president."

"Without seeing the work," says Charles Bopp, a spokesman for the Secret Service, "a determination can't be made at this time."

Books have played roles in certain American tragedies. Timothy McVeigh handed out copies of "The Turner Diaries" before the Oklahoma City bombing. John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, and Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, both carried copies of "The Catcher in the Rye." James Edward Perry followed 22 of the recommendations in "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors" in the 1993 Silver Spring contract killings of Mildred Horn, her quadriplegic son, Trevor, and Trevor's nurse, Janice Saunders, according to prosecutors.

Baker's fiction is written like a script for a two-man play. It is satirical at some points, serious at others. There are fanciful flourishes and fierce, furious fits of anger.

The critically admired Baker is a master of written-from-a-weird-angle fiction. His novel "Vox" was basically a phone-sex conversation. And "The Mezzanine" is a 135-page meditation on an escalator ride.

In "Checkpoint," the main character, Jay, rants and rages against Bush. He says he hasn't felt so much hostility against any other president -- not Nixon, not Reagan.

Of Bush, Jay says: "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too."

He is outraged that the United States armed forces have used napalm-like bombs in Iraq. He says: "It's improved fire jelly -- it's even harder to put out than the stuff they used in Vietnam. And Korea. And Germany. And Japan. It just has another official name. Now it's called Mark 77. I mean, have we learned nothing? Mark 77! I'm going to kill that bastard."

He uses expletives to identify the president. At one point he says, "He's one dead armadillo."

Much of the book is serious polemic, based on Baker's reporting. The title, "Checkpoint," comes from a story that Jay read in the Sydney Morning Herald about a Shiite family of 17 that was seeking safe haven in southern Iraq in 2003. At a checkpoint south of Karbala, U.S. forces opened fire on the family's Land Rover. Several family members died; two young girls were decapitated by the gunfire. Jay chokes up when recounting the story to Ben.

Some of the ways Jay envisions killing the president are ludicrous. One is radio-controlled flying saws that "look like little CDs but they're ultrasharp and they're totally deadly, really nasty."

Another is a remote-controlled boulder made of depleted uranium.

"You're going to squash the president?" Ben asks Jay.

But Jay also has a gun and some bullets. And Ben realizes at one point that even if Jay is crazy, he is still talking about killing a sitting president. "If the FBI and the Secret Service . . . come after me because I've been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make some crazy attempt on the life of the president, I'm totally cooked," Ben says. "Yes, you were talking a lot of delusional gobbledygook about homing bullets, but basically your intent was clear. I'll have to say that. I'm scared."

Jay calls Bush an "unelected [expletive] drunken OILMAN" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book every morning."

He calls Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "rusted hulks" and "zombies" who have "fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they've been lying, and they're stumbling around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they're going, 'We -- are -- your -- advisers.' "

Cheney, Jay says, is "hunched, man, the corruption has completely hunched and gnarled him. His mouth is pulled totally over on one side of his face."

The novel, says Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards, "is a portrait of an anguished protagonist pushed to extremes. Baker is using the framework and story structure as a narrative device to express the discontent many in America are feeling right now."

Bogaards says: "It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics. Upton Sinclair did it. So did John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages."

I love the radio-controlled flying saws. I'm definitely going to get this.

I am reading Baker now. It is interesting to see someone on this thread talk of him as a prose aesthete. He is, I think, if one who deliberately foils his own bids for beauty.

Yes: he is an aesthete, an endlessly Nabokovian, but he makes his sentences long, endless, clause-ridden, Wilsonian, or at best Jamesian (but no, Wilsonian is right: Baker retains clarity while hauling a long sentence down a page in a way that I'm not certain James does), and in that sense they undermine the aestheticism. He .. clogs his talent, if you like. But that shows an alternative talent: a talent for holding a long sentence together, beginning to end.

I am only reporting on U & I, though: I cannot claim that the rest of the work is the same.

The second 'an' should possibly depart the first sentence above: I must have changed my sense of what I was about to try to say.

his best long sentences are in Room Temperature but U&I is stunning, my favourite book of his (and now missing, argh).

itry my best to break those wall but u build ver storg 4 me